But she’d always been a sucker for his mother’s Yorkshire puddings and rich, Guinness-y gravy, and Rhonda Murphy damn well knew it.
*
With great trepidation, Fin finally accepted his long-ignored invite to the Murphy family WhatsApp chat. Surely his mother was exaggerating?
Nope…
He scrolled quickly through the reams and reams of messages that contained a mishmash of different topics but mostly, this last week, there’d been only one. And it was hot!
Feeney.
Feeney watch, to be exact. All speculating on where the hell they were and why the hell they were being so damn secretive. There were multiple pics of them posted from the night of the party as well as at the footy club, with every single nuance of their body language parsed. There was one grainy photo taken from a distance of two people sitting on the jetty at the lake one evening, which his second cousin Erica insisted was the first non-party, non-footy sighting.
Sighting?Like theywereroyalty. Or the first damn pheasants of the season.
The debate over that one raged for several days, with members of his family either supporting or disputing the identity of the mystery couple. Itcouldn’tbe them, Catherine messaged, because there was a slight gap between them that no newly engaged couple would ever countenance. Andrew, another cousin, agreed because the guy on the jetty had straighter hair than Fin. But his wife pointed out that was definitely a Murphy nose.
Which caused an interesting flurry of conversation about the origins of the nose.
Donny reignited the dispute by also agreeing it wasn’t the reclusive couple because of the timestamp on the photo, which meant it had to have been taken after footy practice, and no way could anyone get from the footy field to the lake in under half an hour even if they were speeding, which they wouldn’t have been since it had been raining that night, which made the windy road to the lake extra hazardous. Even taking into account the excellent condition and tread depth of the tyres on Fin’s brand new hire car.
Mai had agreed, because for sure no man who loved his woman the way Fin loved Sweeney would ever risk killing her in a car crash just so they could canoodle away from the eyes of the town.
Jesus.
Fin shook his head. Had the entire family drunk the Kool Aid? He was surprised there hadn’t been mentions of alien abductions and crop circles.
‘Check this out.’
He passed his phone to Sweeney, who looked at it as though it was a poisoned chalice. ‘Oh god, what?’
‘Just thought you might like to see the level of Feeney fever that seems to be making every Murphy in Ballyshannon and surrounds lose their minds.’
Fin watched as Sweeney started to scroll. She frowned and glanced at him. ‘There’s a Feeney watch?’
He shrugged. ‘Apparently.’
Her eyes darted back and forth across the screen, getting larger and larger, until she got to the lake sighting. ‘Is this for real? Maybe we’reallstuck in a ridiculous fever dream?’
‘It’s feeling more like an LSD trip now, to be honest.’
She quirked an eyebrow as she peered at him over the top of the screen. ‘And you would know this how?’
Fin threw her his most affronted look, which was hard when he was trying not to smile. ‘I’ve been to music festivals.’
‘Oh, really?’ She laughed. ‘You’vedropped acid?’
Feeling more and moreactuallyaffronted, Fin said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
She laughed again, as though it was the most hysterical thing she’d ever heard, but stopped abruptly as Fin frowned. ‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘I don’t know. You’re so… you were always so…’
‘So what?’
‘So square.’ She looked at him as though she wasn’t sure why she was having to even articulate it. ‘C’mon, Fin, you know you were.’
Fin supposed that was true and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise. But … he wasn’t the same gangly, giant-headed dork from way back when. It was suddenly exceptionally annoying to realise that Sweeney still saw him as that kid.
Not the man he’d become.
